The latest star maps are rewriting the story of our Milky Way, revealing a much more tumultuous history than astronomers suspected
To understand why the universe is made of matter and not antimatter, physicists are looking for a tiny signal in the electron
Special assemblages of minuscule fossils bring dinosaur ecosystems to life
Amid war with Hamas, a hostage crisis, the devastation of Gaza, and Israel’s splintering identity, the Prime Minister seems unable to distinguish between his own interests and his country’s.
To be vigilant—to live without illusions about the ever-present threat of annihilation—was a primary value at No. 4 Haportzim Street, once the Jerusalem address of the Netanyahu family. This wariness had ancient roots. In the Passover Haggadah, the passage beginning “Vehi Sheamda” reminds everyone at the Seder table that in each generation an enemy “rises up to destroy” the Jewish people. “But the Holy One, Blessed be He, delivers us from their hands,” the Haggadah continues. Benzion Netanyahu, the family patriarch and a historian of the Spanish Inquisition, was a secular man. For deliverance, he looked not to faith but to the renunciation of naïveté and the strength of arms. This creed became his middle son’s inheritance, the core of his self-conception as the uniquely unillusioned defender of the State of Israel.
An ambitious law set forth a more humane way to address addiction. Then came the backlash.
By E. Tammy Kim
In the early months of the pandemic, joggers on the Bear Creek Greenway, in southern Oregon, began to notice tents cropping up by the path. The Greenway, which connects towns and parks along a tributary of the Rogue River, was beloved for its wetlands and for stands of oaks that attracted migrating birds. Now, as jobs disappeared and services for the poor shut down, it was increasingly a last-ditch place to live. Tents accumulated in messy clusters, where people sometimes smoked fentanyl, and “the Greenway” became a byword for homelessness and drug use. On a popular local Facebook page, one typical comment read, “Though I feel sorry for some of the people in that situation, most of them are just pigs.” In Medford, the largest city along the trail, police demolished encampments and ticketed people for sleeping rough.
BARRON’S MAGAZINE – JANUARY 15, 2024 ISSUE:
Interest rates will come down, but our panelists don’t see another magnificent year for stocks. Eight picks to beat the odds.
Too much tech and communication services. Not enough finance and healthcare. We make some changes.Long read
The industry’s big win could bring a flood of new money to Bitcoin, but it still faces hurdles to going mainstream.Long read
THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW (January 12, 2024): The latest issue features ‘What Happens When Writers Embrace Artificial Intelligence as Their Muse? by A.O. Scott…
What happens when writers embrace artificial intelligence as their muse?
By A.O. Scott
The robots of literature and movies usually present either an existential danger or an erotic frisson. Those who don’t follow in the melancholy footsteps of Frankenstein’s misunderstood monster march in line with the murderous HAL 9000 from “2001: A Space Odyssey,” unless they echo the siren songs of sexualized androids like the ones played by Sean Young in “Blade Runner” and Alicia Vikander in “Ex Machina.”
We fantasize that A.I. programs will seduce us or wipe us out, enslave us or make us feel unsure of our own humanity. Trained by such narratives, whether we find them in “Terminator” movies or in novels by Nobel laureates, we brace ourselves for a future populated by all kinds of smart, possibly sentient machines that will disrupt our most cherished notions of what it means to be human.
For Álvaro Enrigue, a novelist fascinated with historical detail, the first meeting of the Aztecs and Spanish conquistadors is the obsession of a lifetime. He brings it to life in “You Dreamed of Empires.”
By Benjamin P. Russell
The Aug. 13, 2021 edition of The New York Times failed to mention the 500th anniversary of the fall of Tenochtitlan, the erstwhile Aztec capital out of which Mexico City was born. Álvaro Enrigue noticed. Of course.
The 54-year-old Enrigue, who grew up in Mexico City, believes that early meeting between Europe and the Americas changed the trajectory of global commerce, urbanism, industry and much else besides. Modernity itself, he argues, was born in the moment the Aztec emperor Moctezuma and Hernan Cortés, the Spanish conquistador, first looked each other in the eye in 1519, a clash of empires that set in motion the city’s capture two years later.
But it should keep its markets open to cheap, clean vehicles
The war against the Houthis is part of an escalating struggle for the seas
Germany is unable and unwilling to lead Europe
THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE (January 12, 2024): The new issue features ‘Why Are American Drivers So Deadly’ – After decades of declining fatality, dangerous driving has surged again….
After decades of declining fatality rates, dangerous driving has surged again.
By Matthew Shaer
In the summer of 1999, a few years after graduating from medical school, Deborah Kuhls moved from New York to Maryland, where she had been accepted as a surgical fellow at the R Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center in Baltimore. Founded by a pioneer in emergency medicine, Shock Trauma is one of the busiest critical-care facilities in the country — in an average year, doctors there see approximately 8,000 patients, many of them close to death.
Andy Reid’s diligence and sense of mischief have made him one of the game’s best-ever coaches. Can he get his struggling Chiefs back to the Super Bowl?
By Michael Sokolove
Andy Reid, the coach of the Kansas City Chiefs, has won more than 250 games in his career, fourth all-time, which puts him high on any list of the N.F.L.’s greatest coaches. Most of the others in that pantheon are men who personify the sport’s militaristic soul — Vince Lombardi, for example, the fabled coach of the 1960s-era Green Bay Packers, or Reid’s contemporary, the grim Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots. But Reid is no Lombardi or Belichick; he’s Steve Jobs. He’s a designer, a tinkerer, a product engineer who imbues his football with creativity and even an occasional touch of whimsy.
Greenhouse gases, El Niño, and cleaner air fueled record heat in 2023
Peeled-apart Indian Plate could be affecting earthquake hazards
The Guardian Weekly (January 10, 2024) – The new issue features ‘Middle East on the brink’ – The threat of a regional war. Also, Inside the Post Office Horizon IT scandal…
The assassination of a Hamas chief in Lebanon. A terror attack on mourners of an Iranian former general. Commercial shipping in the Red Sea targeted by Yemeni rebels, and a US airstrike in Iraq. All were separate events in the Middle East last week but all were linked, in one way or another, to the presence of autonomous but Iranian-backed militia forces in the region.
When asked to visualise the threat of war engulfing the Middle East, for this week’s cover, illustrator Carl Godfrey took a literal approach. “I wanted to convey the tense and unpredictable situation,” says Carl, “and there’s nothing more tense than looking down the barrel of a gun. Especially when those barrels are pointing in all directions, and the risk of war is expanding in all directions.”
Scientists are devising ways to edit the genomes of immune cells without having to extract them from the people being treated.
A massive quake that triggered tsunamis, fires and multiple aftershocks was the largest on the country’s west coast in more than a century.
Studies of the microbes living on and in our bodies are conducted mainly in a few rich countries, squandering opportunities to improve the health of people globally.
Times Literary Supplement (January 10, 2024): The latest issue features ‘Have a good trip’ – On the uses of psychedelic drugs; Hisham Matar’s novel of London exile; A West Bank tragedy; Puzzled by crosswords; French Band Aid, and more…
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